So what are the tools we need so we can start writing our pages? First is a text editor. This is the tool we are going to use when we write our HTML files. There's a lot of text editors out there, most basic would be Microsoft's Notepad but there's also a lot of free text/html editors primarily intended for HTML editing. An example of this is the HTML-Kit (you can download HTML-Kit here), which is my favorite, but you can use any text/html editor of your choice.
There are also a lot of WYSIWYG HTML editors like Dreamweaver, FrotPage, etc. but in this tutorial, we will be using hard coded HTML so we don't need these WYSIWYG html editors yet. Although they are very useful when you are going to venture into serious web development. We will be doing the "hard way" of hard coding HTML since I believe this will be a very strong foundation for your knowledge in web development.
Next is a webhost. We won't be running your websites in your local computers only. Our goal here is let you make a website that is accessible in the internet. Take note of our goal, you are going to make money through your website so one pre-requisite here is a webhost. There's a lot of FREE web hosting companies out there. Let's just have these FREE ones in our course and opt for the paid ones later.
Since the webhost is a remote computer somewhere in the internet, you need also a tool to transfer your local files to the webhost. Here, you need an FTP client. There's also a lot of free FTP clients out there and I can recommend FireFTP which is an add-on to Mozilla FireFox. I prefer to use FireFTP for it's portability since I can install it in every computer that I use.
Another tool we are going to use here is the web browser. Any browser (Internet Explorer, FireFox, Opera, Chrome, etc.) will do. You can use whatever browser is installed in your computer.
How are you going to edit your files?
First, write your HTML codes through the HTML editor you chose. Save it, let us say, in c:\myweb, and name it myfirst.html. To view your page, you are going to use your web browser. Write the complete path of your page in the web browser's address bar, in our example "c:\myweb\myfirst.html" (without the quote). If you want to modify the page, go back to your HTML editor, update it, then save. To view the changes go to your browser, then "Refresh" the page (F5) and the updates will be reflected in the page.
You will be doing that again and again until you will be satisfied with the result and that page then is ready to be uploaded in the internet through your chosen web host. In this stage, you are going to use FireFTP to upload your files.